'Zorro' made Fairbanks a swashbuckling hero

Douglas Fairbanks forged a new and indelible screen persona when he switched from light comedy to swashbuckling roles, such as his role in "The Mark of Zorro." (Alpha Home Entertainment)

Apart from a few irredeemable film geeks (guilty as charged), few people recall that Douglas Fairbanks began his career as a comedian (that's those who recall Fairbanks at all, given the silent-film era is increasingly remote).

His comedy was, not surprisingly, of the athletic variety that had Doug indulging in - as one writer put it - the kind of activities that were recommended to adolescent boys to take their minds off sex. This hyperactive screen presence worked best in the Sherlock Holmes parody "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish," where he played Coke Ennyday.

Most of the films, however, poked fun at current fads. In 1919, he, his future wife, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin and director D.W. Griffith joined forces to create United Artists. All four were, essentially, their own producers - and with their own studio facilities - but they were under contract to turn their films over to others for distribution. U.A. would give them complete control and all the profits.

For Fairbanks it also signaled a new artistic direction, and he became film's first swashbuckler - and a very successful one at that. Not until after the coming of sound would Fairbanks again don modern dress on screen or play the role of someone born in the U.S. And even though the modern comedies he'd made previously far outnumbered the spectacles, he'll be forever remembered for buckling his swash.

The actor's turn as Zorro in "The Mark of Zorro" was a cautiously made step in the light of growing audience enthusiasm for epics following Griffith's "Birth of a Nation.

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" Unlike his later adventure films, "Zorro" was shot inexpensively on standing sets left over from western films. And in staging the masked hero's battles with the Spanish soldiers in slapstick fashion, Doug wasn't straying far from his earlier comedies.

The fey persona of Zorro's alter-ego, Don Diego - who would rather make puppets from his handkerchief than court the fair young maiden chosen by his parents as his prospective bride - falls not so far from some of the modern comedies.

New to the Fairbanks' persona is the ardent lover, and here we can be glad that sound had not come along because the purple prose of the intertitles would have drawn derisive guffaws had it been spoken aloud. (Overwrought love proclamations would also be a feature of future Fairbanks' adventure spectacles.) But ignore that, or laugh through it as well, because everything else is just nonstop fun. This first of Fairbanks' action-adventure outings is easily his best.

1920 / Alpha Home Entertainment / 98m / $7.98 [unrated]

ANY LAST WORDS?

I'm trying to imagine the reaction of anyone who picks up a copy of "Any Last Words?" under the impression that it's anything like a standard western - an impression the box art and copy does nothing to alter. But what we have here is a metaphysical western with some less-than-deep philosophizing ("The choices they make will define them just as surely as yours will define you.") and a mystifying obsession with lizards.

The film begins with Bat Masterson (Tom Lagleder) lying unconscious on the ground in the desert and encountered by itinerant peddler Mobius Agician - M. Agician, get it? - (played by Paul Tinder, who is also one of the film's producers) who either has very, very dark eyes or is wearing Vodlemort-style black contact lenses. Bat gets up out of his body and is taken on a tour of various episodes in his life, past and future; just so we don't think writer/director Vaughn Taylor (who also plays Belle Starr) is trying to rip off Charles Dickens without credit, she even has Bat ask Mobius if he's the Ghost of Christmas Past. Bat knows something screwy is up because, in addition to seeing his body lying in the sand, a stone he throws hits him in the back rather than striking Mobius.

The incidents chosen suggest that Masterson became a legend despite a fairly dull life filled with forgettable conversations. I suppose that's true of most of our lives and an early onscreen legend notes that everything in the film is based on historical facts, but picking the unexciting times and dramatizing them in banal fashion may be carrying accuracy a tad too far. The actors are either sadly uninteresting or have been directed to keep things subdued; I suspect the latter because all the scenes are played at the same level - no highs, no lows and often no proper payoff.

This is exacerbated by some very curious editing that has cutaways to odd viewpoints or peculiar details. Not only are these more distracting than interesting, they also drag out scenes that might otherwise have played with some punch - or at least not extend beyond the point where they're interesting. A funeral procession goes on and on, shown from every conceivable angle, and before it just ends; the only point to it seems to be for Taylor to give her possibly volunteer extras a whole bunch of close-ups. (And given none of the mourners' mouths are moving just who the dickens is singing "Amazing Grace" anyway?)

Repeated close-ups of arrows thudding into a cabin and a flurry of rapidly-cut shots of Indians to depict an Indian attack suggests both a small budget and a complete inability to stage action scenes. But the real problem with "Any Last Words?" is that whatever message it is trying to convey is so muddled as to be indecipherable.

2012 / Lionsgate / 90m / $26.98 [PG-13]

AU PAIR GIRLS

After the relaxation of censorship in Britain and the U.S. in the late 1960s, filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic started making lots and lots of smutty films.

The major difference between the two countries is that in Britain the films were helmed by journeymen directors who had been active in the country's film industry for years. Some were quite talented, even if they never quite broke into the Michael Powell and David Lean leagues, and had to make do with whatever assignments they could land.

Val Guest, who directed "Au Pair Girls" is a case in point. Arguably his best work was in several gritty science-fiction films - including the first two Quatermass entries and a bleak little item "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" - but he also directed Laurence Harvey in "Expresso Bongo" and was hired by producer Charles Feldman to make sense of "Casino Royale." Other than that he took on very nearly everything he was offered, and by the early 1970s that included so-called "nudie-cuties" such as this one. Guest even co-wrote the script.

Ah, well, as Fritz Lang once told Peter Bogdanovich, "Even directors have to eat," and reportedly Guest afterward regretted having undertaken the project, though it didn't stop him from making "Confessions of a Window Cleaner" a few years later.

There is no plot here, only a set-up that allows for the titular young women (Gabrielle Drake, Me Me Lai, Nancie Wait and Astrid Frank) to remove their clothing as frequently as possible or at least strip down to see-through lingerie. Aside from one guy, the men all keep their trousers on even while indulging in sex - who wants to see naked guys anyway, right? The sex scenes are too brief to be properly termed soft-core, but there are quite a few of them.

Essentially, what we have here are four extended, alternating sketches that have the Au Pairs arrive in Britain, receive their assignments and head off to their employers. One strips down as soon as she's in her bedroom, inquires of the lady of the house if she might take a bath and promptly bounces naked down the hallway to the loo. The husband returns home and encounters her in this state and says, "Oh, pair" while staring at her breasts. That's the level of wit we've got going on here, though to be honest that's a higher level than is sometimes displayed in these films.

And at least Guest's contribution to the form never pretends to be anything other than a naughty romp, unlike many that passed themselves off as thrillers or horror films. That doesn't make it any less forgettable.

1972 / Jezebel / 90m / $19.95 BluRay [R]

CSI - The Twelfth Season

CSI: NY - The Eighth Season

CSI: MIAMI - The Final Season

Television has long had a habit of copying successful series in one way or another.

"I Love Lucy" was prompted by a now-forgotten sitcom called "I Married Joan" and it, in turn, begat a slew of dizzy-wife sitcoms. Then there are spin-offs such as "Pete and Gladys" that promoted characters from "December Bride" into their own show just as later "Laverne and Shirley" and "Mork and Mindy" were derived from "Happy Days." I think we have "Star Trek: The Next Generation" to thank for the phenomena of multiple series with the same prefixed title, however, though the sundry "Law and Order" series probably cemented the franchise concept.

Here's evidence that, until recently, at least three series boasting the "CSI" designation (that's Crime Scene Investigation) were running concurrently. There may be more for all I know, set in such other major cities as Chicago or Dallas or Seattle.

All fall into the category of police procedural shows in which an intrepid team investigates some crime, usually a murder or somehow involving one. The shows don't really qualify as mysteries because in some episodes the culprit is obvious from the beginning and, in others, he or she is only revealed when some forensic item coughs up a fingerprint or DNA match from some database and the culprit turns out to be a character that hasn't even figured into the action to that point.

Now I know that the Homeland Security overhaul is supposed to have made access of computer files between various law-enforcement agencies easier, but I'm a little doubtful it's quite the snap that's depicted in these series. In fact, acquaintances in that field tell me they can't watch shows such as "CSI" because they are so removed from reality.

I can't speak as to how "science-fictiony" the computer stuff is in these series, but I'm pretty certain that only the largest police departments can actually afford anything like what's on display here (this is why there is no "CSI: East Petersburg"), if it actually exists. The ease with which the characters in these shows tap into non-governmental systems may seem a tad credulity-stretching, but then I recall that there are sites on the Internet where you can get a real-time view of my house courtesy some satellite in orbit around our planet. I suppose as long as I never leave my house I can avoid being spied on by someone. But I'm not even sanguine about that. Big brother is here, and we've embraced him so far as surveillance is concerned.

Where things get a mite unbelievable is in the digs that are occupied by the teams in shows like this, though in this case it's only "CSI: Miami" that really boggles the mind (and the eyeballs); the HQ in that show looks like a set left over from "Forbidden Planet." Any police department that can afford to build something that lush clearly has too many taxpayer dollars to play with.

All three shows deal with the collection of evidence and clues, some of it gathered with tweezers in the time-honored fashion of Sherlock Holmes. Time and again the crucial bit of evidence is found easily and conveniently when one of the characters walks in and spots that pubic hair sticking up out of a puddle of blood by a 16th of an inch. My favorite bits are when one of the investigators wanders into the lab, glances over a body that's just undergone a complete autopsy and says, "Hey, doc, what's this?" (A warming to the squeamish: these shows aren't short on gruesome corpses.)

Well, of course, we're talking entertainment here, not a documentary on the Discovery Channel. And as entertainment, these shows work, particularly in regards to their cast members. Ted Danson becomes the new head of the Las Vegas crew in that show's 12th season and lends a quirky touch, while the wonderful Sela Ward and Gary Sinise (who looks so much like DeForest Kelly I expected him to say, "He's dead, Jim," whenever he approaches a corpse) head up the New York show. The Miami version featured Christian Clemenson - who I remember fondly from "The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr." - as the pathologist (the guy who gets to say, "Odd, I hadn't noticed that," to the question posed above).

All three shows are intricately plotted as well, which is a plus. But take the proceedings with a very large grain of salt.